Women diagnosed with breast cancer will live for 20 years, study says

A Cancer Research UK study used statistics from the last 30 years to estimate that 64% of women newly diagnosed with breast cancer in England and Wales will live for at least 20 years - compared with 44% in the early 1990s.

About 72 percent of all women diagnosed with the illness in England and Wales will survive 10 years and 66 percent will reach the 20-year mark, according to Reuters.

Survival in women aged 50 to 69 - the age group in which breast cancer is most commonly diagnosed - was even better, Guardian Unlimited reports.

But the experts said the true survival rate in the future could be even better, as new treatments such as Herceptin help boost women's chances of beating the disease.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide. More than a million cases occur each year and about 400,000 women die of the disease, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, FranceA.M.